[Footnote 253: Moreover, he is never tired of
insisting that the Will is everything.
“If your will is right, you cannot go wrong,”
he says. “With the will I can do everything.”
“Love resides in the will—­the more
will, the more love.” “There is nothing
evil but the evil will, of which sin is the appearance.”
“The value of human life depends entirely on
the aim which it sets before itself.” This
over-insistence on purity of intention as the end,
as well as the beginning, of virtue, is no doubt connected
with Eckhart’s denial of reality and importance
to the world of time; he tries to show that it does
not logically lead to Antinomianism. His doctrine
that good works have no value in themselves differs
from those of Abelard and Bernard, which have a superficial
resemblance to it. Eckhart really regards the
Catholic doctrine of good works much as St. Paul treated
the Pharisaic legalism; but he is as unconscious of
the widening gulf which had already opened between
Teutonic and Latin Christianity, as of the discredit
which his own writings were to help to bring upon the
monkish view of life.]

[Footnote 254: As an example of his free handling
of the Old Testament, I may quote, “Do not suppose
that when God made heaven and earth and all things,
He made one thing to-day and another to-morrow.
Moses says so, of course, but he knew better; he only
wrote that for the sake of the populace, who could
not have understood otherwise. God merely willed
and the world was.”]

[Footnote 256: So Hermann of Fritslar says that
the soul has two faces, the one turned towards this
world, the other immediately to God. In the latter
God flows and shines eternally, whether man is conscious
of it or not. It is therefore according to man’s
nature as possessed of this Divine ground, to seek
God, his original; and even in hell the suffering
there has its source in hopeless contradiction of
this indestructible tendency. See Vaughan, vol.
i. p. 256; and the same teaching in Tauler, p. 185.]